446 Gary D. Farney
haruspicy (i.e., from the entrails of sacrificed animals), the so-calleddisciplina Etrusca.
The Roman state steadily increased the number of times it asked Etruscanharuspicesfor
their advice, and, by the time of Cicero, their skills were greatly esteemed and widely
accepted by the Romans. Etruscan aristocratic origin was believed to be fully necessary
to be a trueharuspex, and when their number decreased the emperor Claudius took
measures to bolster their order. Their religious authority may have been one of the few
advantages of Etruscan descent for aspiring Roman politicians (Farney 2007: 150–64).
Despite their early connection to Rome, surprisingly few Etruscan Romans can be iden-
tified who held office at Rome, and identifiable ones really only start to appear in large
numbers in Roman offices after the Social War. The early Empire, however, saw a great
rise in the number of senators and consuls of Etruscan descent, and indeed a Roman
emperor of undoubted Etruscan origin would even appear by 69CEin the person of the
usurper Otho.
Aside from these three groups, so connected with early Rome, first one must consider
the people who inhabited much of what became Cicero’sLatium adiectum.Thishad
been the land of the Hernici, Volsci, Aequi, and Aurunci, its pre-conquest population
helping to fill the cities later founded (or refounded) by the Romans in the course of
the fifth through third centuriesBCE. These people lost most of their identity by the
time our extant writers talk about them, and they leave us neither as full a material
record as the Etruscans, nor much writing of their own (Gnade 2002: 157–61). What
we have in our Roman literary sources often comes from stories of the legendary origins
of their successful, Roman(ized) families. Three families of Volscian origin—the Gellii
of Minturnae, the Aelii Lamiae from Formiae, and possibly the Cossutii—possessed
genealogies from Neptune via his many lovers and progeny, and so did the Lucretii
of Antium, from a Latin town taken over by the Volscians for two centuries, and
the Plautii Hypsaei, who may have been Aequian in origin (Wiseman 1974; Farney
2007: 64–5). These Neptunian genealogies may be attempts to rationalize the origins
of these families’ wealth and prominence, namely from maritime trade and Rome’s
newly won overseas empire. As a result, they may not reflect any element of their
“native” identity.
A few families from the Volscian part of this region, however, record royal ancestors
for themselves. Plutarch notes a kingly Volscian ancestor for Cicero, though the orator
himself never mentions this in our extant works (Cicero1.2; cf. Livy 2.35.7–8, 37–40,
Silius Italicus 8.401–409). There seems to be a similar genealogy for the Messii, originally
a business family who became senatorial in the first centuryBCE. The Messii seem to have
arisen from around Volscian Formiae, and accordingly Livy (4.28–29) tells at length of
a very heroic Vettius Messius who led Volscians against the Romans in 431BCE(Farney
forthcoming). One wonders if this is a memory of an earlier type of political organization
in the region, by the kind of local warlords whom Livy describes Rome fighting against
in the middle Republic.
Other Italic peoples were sufficiently dissimilar to the Romans in culture and language
to suffer stereotyping: wild Apennine mountain folk, Marsic witches, and arrogant Cam-
panians who had defected to Hannibal. These reputations were no doubt aided by their
occasional rebellions against Rome and, especially for the people of the central Apennines,
by their apparent lack of organization beyond the village level. Few upper-class members
of these groups had any success at all in Rome before the Social War, and perhaps very